UPDATE 2023/12/31: This is the first post for my blog after I converted my personal website hecker.org to use Blosxom. I’m including it here for historical interest. After a long period of neglecting my personal web site, I’ve decided to start my own weblog, with the goal of making it easier for me to publish new material and therefore (I hope) more likely that I’ll actually write more. My plan is to write about things that interest me, on the theory that they might interest at least a few other people. As part of that I’ll occasionally discuss the volunteer work I’ve been doing for the Mozilla project. ...

UPDATE 2023-03-27: This page is obsolete, as it refers to a prior version of this blog. However, it may be of historical interest. As many people can attest, sometimes you spend more time (and have more fun) tinkering with the underpinnings of a web site instead of actually writing new content to be posted on it. In that spirit, here is my current list of things I’m planning to add to or change about my web site and blog. ...

UPDATE 2023-03-27: This page is obsolete, as it refers to a prior version of this blog. However, it may be of historical interest. The “official” atomfeed plugin does not generate valid feeds for the current version (0.3) of the Atom specification because the output does not have a “modified” element for the feed as a whole, just “modified” elements for each story. Obviously the modification date/time for the feed can be interpreted as the date/time modified of the most recent story, so then it’s just a matter of generating the proper output for the MODIFIED tags. ...

UPDATE 2023-03-27: This page is obsolete, as it refers to a prior version of this blog. However, it may be of historical interest. In a previous post I discussed the general problem of validating and caching dynamic content. In order to implement the strategy outlined in that post I decided to create a new version of the lastmodified plugin originally created by Bob Schumaker. The lastmodified plugin was a good base to build on; however it didn’t do exactly what I wanted to do, and hence I couldn’t resist trying to improve on it. ...

UPDATE 2023-03-27: This page is obsolete, as it refers to a prior version of this blog. However, it may be of historical interest. One of the things I enjoy about setting up my own blog with the Blosxom software is learning about the deep details of web protocols and formats that I’ve never worried about before. (This might have been the case if I’d used another blogging system, but the hackable nature of Blosxom inspires, nay, almost demands it.) Lately I’ve been educating myself about HTTP conditional GET requests and validation and caching of dynamically-generated content. ...

UPDATE 2023-03-27: This page is obsolete, as it refers to a prior version of this blog. However, it may be of historical interest. I’ve done a lot of work related to software licensing as part of the Mozilla relicensing project and when I worked at CollabNet. As a result of enduring endess wrangling about licensing terms I’ve been put off complex licensing schemes, and prefer to make my own works available under very liberal terms. ...

UPDATE 2023-03-27: This page is obsolete, as it refers to a prior version of this blog. However, it may be of historical interest. When stock Blosxom sees a URL that doesn’t correspond to an existing entry or list of entries, it simply puts up a “normal” page (i.e., using the standard heat and foot templates for that flavour) that doesn’t have any actual content. I really don’t like this behavior, and thus I decided to try out the emptymessage plugin created by Fletcher Penney. Unfortunately I wasn’t entirely happy with its behavior either, and so I decided to patch it. ...

UPDATE 2023-03-27: This page is obsolete, as it refers to a prior version of this blog. However, it may be of historical interest. As noted in a previous post, I am a big fan of the Markdown text-to-HTML conversion tool. However, nothing’s perfect. I already discussed a bug involving link ids, and I subsequently found one other reason to patch Markdown, for sites like mine that generate both HTML 4.01 Strict and XML pages (an Atom feed in my case). ...

UPDATE 2023-03-27: This page is obsolete, as it refers to a prior version of this blog. However, it may be of historical interest. In creating my blog I wanted to be able to go beyond plain text entries but avoid having to hand-code HTML. I looked at various schemes for marking up plain text to indicate the presence of links, ordered and unordered lists, preformatted text, etc. In particular I was familar with Textile and Pod from having used them in my Blosxom annotations project. (I didn’t look at all of these, but some other entrants in the “plain text markup” space include ReStructured Text, Texturize, and the various implementations of text markup for Wikis.) ...

UPDATE 2023-03-27: This page is obsolete, as it refers to a prior version of this blog. However, it may be of historical interest. I’ve been investigating using the Blosxom weblog application for my personal blog, and felt disadvantaged by my lack of knowledge of Perl (the language in which Blosxom was written). I began making detailed notes while I was reading through the Blosxom code (blosxom.cgi); my note taking quickly got out of hand, and here are the results, for anyone who’s interested: ...